Back to the Past

Nov 10, 2025 — Olivia Laing’s second novel is set in mid-1970s Rome, where Fellini is shooting Casanova and Pasolini is at work on Salò.

Sep 20, 2022 — The Canadian auteur Atom Egoyan’s strip-club-set drama is an intricate tapestry of grief and trauma, held together by a longing for human connection.

May 25, 2022 — Combining the expressive power of a great storyteller with the skill of a master craftsman, Sean Phillips is an artist we’ve come back to time and time again at Criterion. From Sweet Smell of Success to On the Waterfront to...

Feb 22, 2022 — The fourth feature by the Hong Kong filmmaker Ann Hui devastatingly lays bare the conditions that spurred hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese to flee after the fall of Saigon.

Sep 21, 2021 — Johnnie To pays homage to Akira Kurosawa in this martial arts drama about the virtue of struggle and self-improvement.

Feb 9, 2021 — What does parallax mean? It is a term that English speakers are perpetually learning and always forgetting. Leopold Bloom, in Ulysses: “Parallax. I never exactly understood . . . Par it’s Greek: parallel, parallax.” In the technical sense, the word...

Jan 14, 2021 — Herman Mankiewicz—a washed-up Hollywood screenwriter writing the first draft of Orson Welles’s 1941 biopic about William Randolph Hearst—may seem an unlikely hero for a 2020 biopic. He is rarely remembered today outside of cinephile circles, but in telling his story,...

Jul 24, 2020 — On our minds this week: Bruce Lee’s legacy, Alfonso Cuarón’s dystopia, Hitchcock’s hands, and those Black Lives Matter movie lists.

Feb 21, 2020 — Songbook “In an instant, I remembered everything.” The Cure, “The Walk” It’s the mid-1980s, and a student in a black leather jacket walks down the hall of Polytechnic of North London. Her hair is dyed a shocking orange, maybe to...

Jul 16, 2019 — When Alan J. Pakula began preparing for the production of Klute (1971), he screened a lot of Alfred Hitchcock films. He looked at Notorious and admired Ingrid Bergman’s work. He revisited Strangers on a Train, struggling with the climactic merry-go-round...